Selling a House With Liens or Code Violations In Buena Vista? We Can Buy Your House For Cash.

He owned the house outright, and was still going to lose it

A single family house in Buena Vista, owned outright. No mortgage on it at all. And three years of unpaid property taxes, with code violations alongside them.

People assume a house with no loan against it is safe, and it is not. There was no lender in this picture and no monthly payment anybody had missed. Just taxes that had gone unpaid for three years running. Owning something free and clear does not protect it from what is owed on it, and that is the part which catches people out — they are not behind on anything they signed for, so it does not feel like the kind of trouble that takes a house.

We paid the back taxes. That was part of the purchase rather than a favour — arrears come off at closing, because that is the only way a sale leaves clean title behind it. The practical effect for him was that the thing threatening the house stopped threatening it.

Then the part he actually needed, which was time. He was not ready to walk out of the house. There were belongings to go through and things to get in order before he would be comfortable leaving, and that is not a weekend.

So he set the closing date. Not us. And after closing he had thirty days or so still in the house, with the money from the sale already in hand.

That order matters more than it sounds. Most people move on the proceeds of the move, which forces the whole thing into the wrong sequence — find somewhere, commit to it, then hope the money lands in time. He had the money first and the deadline last, which is the only version of this that lets somebody choose where they are going instead of taking whatever is available.